Building a brand is an essential part of every company’s strategy. Whether you are in charge of a small one-person band or a huge international company, your brand is an important way of engaging clients and staff, building loyalty, and helping your business to grow.
Brands are notoriously hard to pin down. Even the biggest, most successful firms, with their well-established brands, have trouble defining what it is that makes their brand stand out from the rest. How can a new business be expected to build a brand if the concept is so difficult to define?
What exactly is a brand?
Branding started as a way of differentiating one type of product or service from another, mainly through the use of packaging and advertising.
Over time, its definition has expanded and now encompasses a company’s aims, beliefs and core values, amongst other factors. Branding can be said to be the epitome of what makes a company what it is – the sum of its attributes.
The problem with this is that everyone experiences a brand differently. One person’s ‘must-use’ company is another person’s ‘take it or leave it’. Brands are so emotionally charged that everyone has their own idea of what they mean on a personal level.
Establishing a brand that everyone sees in an equally positive light is therefore impossible – even to the biggest, most successful companies. The best you can hope for is that you appeal to a wide range of people.
How can you define your company?
According to financial website The Balance, you need to ask a whole series of questions about your firm, its aims and ambitions, its target market and its core values to define a brand.
Once you have established what is important to you, you then need to start projecting this brand to your employees and clients, using every means possible. This could include making a brand promise, becoming involved in the local community, treating employees in the right way, and making every client contact count.
To help your company to define and develop its brand, you may want to use the services of a brand and strategy innovation agency such as www.lightbulbinnovation.com/.
However you go about it, defining your brand is an essential step towards making it a success.
